Research Associate: Quantitative Microbiology

Research Associate:
Quantitative Microbiology

Join to apply for the Research Associate:
Quantitative Microbiology role at The University of Sheffield

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The University of Sheffield is a remarkable place to work. Our people are at the heart of everything we do. Their diverse backgrounds, abilities and beliefs make Sheffield a world‑class university. We offer a fantastic range of benefits including a highly competitive annual leave entitlement (with the ability to purchase more), a generous pensions scheme, flexible working opportunities, a commitment to your development and wellbeing, a wide range of retail discounts, and much more.

Find out more about our benefits and join us to become part of something special.

This Wellcome Trust funded post is part of a larger project that combines atomic force microscopy (AFM), super‑resolution microscopy, microbiology, and image analysis tools to understand how the cell wall of Streptococcus pneumoniae reacts to antimicrobials at the nanometre level. Pneumonia causes more than one million deaths annually and S. pneumoniae is the main pathogen that causes this disease, yet we still lack detailed knowledge of how antibiotics work at the nanoscale level.

Most antibiotics target the bacterial cell wall, but antimicrobial resistance is a rising health emergency, and they are being less effective against resistant strains. We do not fully understand the architecture of the cell wall of S. pneumoniae and how it relates to antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Our lab is in a strong position to decipher these features, having achieved the highest resolution imaging of S.

pneumoniae cell walls by atomic force microscopy (AFM).

This project will use cutting‑edge microscopy and image analysis tools to:

• Decipher the architecture of the S. pneumoniae clinical isolates cell wall at nanometre resolution
• Determine precisely how antibiotics damage this key bacterial target
• Test novel antimicrobial strategies focusing on bacteriophage cocktails, and compare their effects to traditional antibiotics

The group consists of Dr Laia Pasquina, a Research Fellow supported by The Wellcome Trust, and a UKRI PhD student focused on understanding the structure of the S. pneumoniae cell wall and how it divides, plus undergraduate and master project students. We also collaborate closely with two PhD students based in the Physics department. We share lab space with other research groups in Biosciences and actively collaborate with established international microbiology teams (mainly from France and the US), fostering a truly interdisciplinary environment.

We are a collaborative team where learning and helping each other is central.

Applicants must hold a PhD or be close to completion (or have equivalent postdoctoral level work experience) in life sciences or physical sciences with experience of using biophysical approaches such as microscopy to understand biological systems and be willing to learn new tools. Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal, along with experience of working in an interdisciplinary environment and overcoming troubleshooting complex problems from different points of view are also essential.

• Conduct atomic force microscopy (AFM) experiments to investigate S. pneumoniae cell wall architecture and antibiotic damage of clinical strains
• Apply super‑resolution microscopy techniques (Fluorescence Force/STORMforce) to determine if the locations of damage from antibiotic correlate to peptidoglycan synthesis regions which are key for normal cell division
• Use general microbiology techniques and assays to grow and maintain the bacterial strains for microscopy and test the effectivity of novel antimicrobials
• Develop and optimise an automatic image analysis pipeline to correlate learnings from AFM and super‑resolution data
• Work closely with collaborators to design an experimental set‑up applying the previous tools above to test the…